When it comes to terrorism, it is the motive, even more than the act, that is wicked.

The assassination on Wednesday of the Syrian defence and deputy defence ministers (the latter of whom was President Bashar Assad’s brother-in-law) and a senior general, raises interesting questions, and not just about the life expectancy of the blood-stained Assad regime.

The rules of thumb in insurrections are that if the regime won’t fire live ammunition at the insurrectionists, and isn’t a democratically chosen government, it is in serious trouble; if it does give the order to fire and the order is not followed, it is doomed; and if it gives such an order and it is followed and the insurrection continues, the regime will not last indefinitely, as conscript forces won’t shoot on their own people for long.

The Shah of Iran and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, like Louis XVI, never gave the order to fire, and fell. Nicolae Ceaușescu gave the order in Romania, and was executed himself instead. Muammar Gadaffi gave the same orders, which were partly carried out; but with a little foreign intervention, the defections soon got out of control, and he was overwhelmed, captured and murdered. Assad has followed the same course as Gaddafi, and has lasted longer because of the solidarity of his 11% Alawite minority and the failure of the West to do much to assist the rebels (aside from inanities like United Nations missions).

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As I have written here (and elsewhere) before, the only morally consistent way to treat recidivist terrorist states such as Libya or Syria is to reply severely to their provocations. When the Libyans killed American servicemen by blowing up a discotheque in West Berlin in 1986, Ronald Reagan levelled Gaddafi’s house; but when they brought down an American airliner over Scotland in 1988, the U.S. did not seriously respond. Syria, similarly, was a submissive conduit of Iranian assistance to Hezbollah and Hamas, and was an avowed promoter of anti-Western terrorism for decades, even attempting to blow up a British airliner in the 1980s, and was not the subject of serious reprisals.

As the steady escalation of terrorist outrages prior to the infamous attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 demonstrated, failure to respond severely is taken by the terrorists as an incitement to go further. And as Ariel Sharon’s practice of killing the current leader of Hamas after each Hamas-sponsored suicide-bombing in Israel demonstrated, violent but measured reprisals soon prove effective. However many manipulable human grenades the Muslim masses may generate, their leaders are not keen to share that fate, as the hypocrisy and cowardice of Osama bin Laden, after all his belligerent videos following 9/11, demonstrated.

The authors of Wednesday’s Damascus bombing say that it was not a suicide attack. But there have been suicide attacks by reform-minded Muslims against terrorist-sponsoring regimes in the past. This observation comes perilously close to demonstrating that suicide attacks can be objectively useful: The fact that the enemies of our enemies can turn the nastiest and most anti-civilized tactics on those who have been sanctimoniously employing them for years against the West is an objectively good phenomenon.

The point is not that the coalition of Syrian rebels who’ve risen up against the Assad regime is a completely desirable group; it obviously includes some terroristic fanatics, and these jihadists may even be preeminent in some places. The point is that the West should be assisting the opposition in Syria, instead of being cowed by the dead hand of Russia.

The Iranian-sponsored (according to Benjamin Netayahu) attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria this week, killing seven and injuring 30, is another indication, added to so many, of the need for the application of counter-force to Iran. For some still unknowable reason, rational United States policy-making about Iran has taken an almost complete holiday since the end of the Ford administration in 1977. Jimmy Carter thought he was striking a blow for democracy by pushing out the Shah and helping to bring in Ayatollah Khomeini, which led directly to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980 and 32 years of promotion of terrorism against the West (which continues), incitement of genocidal anti-Semitism, and years of nuclear sabre-rattling, as well as a catastrophically incompetent and despotic theocracy in Iran. It will be interesting to discover eventually what inducements the incoming Reagan administration used to secure the release of the Embassy hostages on Inauguration Day, 1981. But apart from some naval actions that sunk much of Iran’s diminutive navy in the latter Reagan years, after Iran mined the tanker routes in the Persian Gulf, the only real American recourse to violence against that country was the mistaken and tragic shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner on a scheduled flight, by the U.S.S. Vincennes, in 1988. (The United States at least paid $62-million in compensation, about $200,000 for each victim, but it was the wrong violence at the wrong time against the wrong target.)

The Obama administration has inflicted some inconvenience on Iran with sanctions, but without extracting a single concession from the Iranians. Sanctions turn the screws on the entire Iranian population, against whom the West has no grievance, rather than the abominable Iranian government, from all accounts as ardently disliked by its own public as by the West.

Margaret Thatcher famously said, in refusing to join sanctions against South Africa, that “I don’t see how we will make things better by making them worse.” It wasn’t sanctions that brought the end of the evil and repulsive Apartheid rule in South Africa, it was the moral opprobrium of the world brought to bear against a white and mixed South Africa that was susceptible to such considerations. There is no reason to believe that sanctions will be adequate in Iran, and apart from whatever shook loose the hostages in 1981, nothing the United States has done to intervene in Iran has made much sense since the CIA-led overthrow of the deranged leader Mohammad Mossadegh (who used to break down in tears while addressing large crowds in his pajamas) by Eisenhower and Churchill in 1953 (for which Obama has, naturally, apologized). American policy toward that country has been so wrong-headed for so long — including Reagan national security adviser Bud MacFarlane going to Tehran in a disguise (allegedly including a red wig), in the midst of the Iran-Contra fiasco in 1986 — that this is not a mere partisan issue, but a national curse, an official, bipartisan astigmatism.

At the risk of seeming to flirt with a notion of the redemptive powers of assassination, and suicide-bombing in particular — and I repeat my disapproval in principle of both murder (but not in self-defence) and suicide — if Count von Stauffenberg, who placed the bomb in his brief case beside Hitler in the Nazi leader’s headquarters at Rastenberg on July 20, 1944, had not left the building to save himself, but had stayed and moved his brief case when Hitler moved, the death camps and the rest of the Nazi murder apparatus would almost certainly have consumed the lives of at least 1.5 million fewer innocents (including Anne Frank and Dietrich Bonhoffer); the war in Europe would have ended at least eight months earlier, saving another million or so lives, and Stauffenberg would have died only one day before he did, and less unpleasantly than, as he did, before a firing squad. He would have spared many hundreds of Hitler’s victims among his alleged fellow-plotters, including Field Marshal Irwin Rommel and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and the scores of brave Germans dragged through “Raving Roland” Freisler’s infamous People’s Court and strangled with piano wire, gruesome spectacles which were recorded on film for the Fuehrer’s personal delectation. This was the Germany of just 68 years ago this week; the country so astonishingly resurrected, physically and morally, that it is now the commanding height of all Europe.

When it comes to terrorism, it is the motive, even more than the act, that is wicked. Most of us in relatively free countries are placatory and seek peace; but if we are pacifists, we will be endlessly assaulted and ultimately enslaved. This is why the West must assist the Syrian opposition and prevent a militarily nuclear Iran (at least under that country’s present leadership).

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